


Loom

by vinvy



Series: Thread [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Assassination, Brain Surgery, Brainwashing, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Character Study, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Drowning, Flashbacks, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Chronological, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Third Person, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Trauma, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-06 23:36:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1876758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinvy/pseuds/vinvy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wanted to be somebody when he grew up.</p><p>He should have been more specific.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loom

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Richard Siken's [Little Beast](http://words-end-here.livejournal.com/29499.html)
> 
> It would behoove you to read the tags, because they also serve as the trigger warnings for this fic. I hope you enjoy it!

In this story, he is not the villain.

__

The longest he’s gone without maintenance was during a seven week mission in Calcutta in 1965. A mission he knows he shouldn’t remember because he’s never supposed to remember missions. Calcutta wasn’t special, but he remembers it anyway.

That was the longest he had gone without maintenance until now.

His left arm is warm, up into his shoulder and chest. He knows that it is _never_ supposed to be warm. But it has been eight weeks since his deployment and seven since the mechanisms of his arm had been pushed beyond their capacity then waterlogged. Dragging a grown man out of the Potomac only put more strain on the motors and synthetic muscle fibers.

The fact that he isn’t leaking refrigerant from his shoulder (or elbow or wrist or knuckles) is testament to the quality of the work done by those who made him.

Except he wasn’t quite made, was he? He was something else once.

__

He has a clear headshot but he shoots him in the back instead.

__

A little bit of gin made the walk home easy, despite the December snow.

He sang the whole way (“ _What do I care how much it may storm? I’ve got my love to keep me warm!_ ”), stepping down the side walk in time and tipping his hat to the lone police officer he passed. A slip on the ice got turned into a twirl around a lamp post and he switched to singing Frank Sinatra.

His landlady scowled at him when he finally got into his building. “Do you know what time it is?”

“No ma’am,” he grinned to her, slipping out of his shoes so he could bound up the six flights of stairs to his apartment without kicking up more of a fuss.

The top floor was supposed to be warmer, but that only held true for the summer. The walls might as well have been made of paper. The neighbor’s baby started squalling when he walked in the front door of the studio he and his best friend shared. At least it wouldn’t be his fault for making noise. Not that much could wake up his best friend, who slept through anything if he wasn’t sick, like his body was trying to make up for all the time lost on nights spent coughing up a lung.

He hung his coat on the chair in the living room, stepped over the creaky floorboards to put his shoes by the stove in the kitchenette. Pants had to go, too—the cuffs were damp from the snow, just like his socks. Winter wasn’t the best season to be poor in.

By the time he was ready to climb into bed he was shivering. So he slipped into bed with his best friend, careful to keep cold feet off of his calves. It was only smart. Neither one of them could afford to get sick from the cold, and body heat under a pile of blankets was guaranteed to keep them warm.

__

Laaksonen, Iiro. Age 47. Biological weapons specialist. Finnish by birth; current citizen of Saudi Arabia. Known terrorist with an affinity for underage girls. He’s on a business trip in Qatar and he calls his wife at 10:18 every morning while he looks out of his hotel room window.

It’s 10:12 in the morning, 37°C in the shade. The wind is 7 mph coming out of the northeast.

The assassin lies, camouflaged, on his belly in a crawlspace just under the roof of an office building. Laaksonen is staying in the hotel room 1000 yards across the cityscape and has been there for three days. The kill order has been stalled for those three days. The assassin has been lying there for two.

Peripherally, he’s aware of all the water his body has lost and how close his cybernetics are to overheating. Minimal sustenance consumption has been a necessity to preserve the security and success of the mission. This means he’s had less than 12 ounces of water in two days.

He does not move from where he’s poised behind the rifle.

Then comes the order, quiet through the speaker in his right ear: “обстрел”

Laaksonen passes in front of the hotel window and his head snaps to the side with the impact of the bullet that travels through one ear and out the other, his cranium and cell phone destroyed in one shot.

The assassin dismantles the rifle and stores it in quick, fluid movements, and leaves the crawlspace to return to his superiors.

__

The drowning is routine. He doesn’t remember ever doing it before but his body swallows the pearlescent fluid willingly, so it must be something he’s done. His superiors look on with varying levels of interest in his condition.

It tastes like chalk and chlorine. It’s a betrayal for something that looks so sweet to taste awful.

After a brief struggle, he can breathe it. Gusts of fluid in and out of his lungs. The tank is murky; he can barely make out the shadows of those above him who are reporting his status to his superiors. The temperature is beginning to lower, but his limbs are too heavy with paralytics to start shivering.

He can feel the insides of his chest cavity cooling. It starts with his left arm and creeps into his collarbone and shoulder blade, and slips along the underside of his ribs. The parts of him that are metal cool the fastest and it spreads from there, until every bit of his innards is cold. He can’t shiver. He can’t open his eyes.

Before he falls asleep, there’s a vision of bones behind his eyes. The anatomical names come to mind—scapula, clavicle, humerus, radius, ulna, meta-carpals, carpals, phalanges—the thumb is on the right side of the hand. They’re the bones of a left arm. It’s reaching up out of the tank but there’s no one to catch it and pull it back out.

__

The neighbors got a radio the year his mother died. They were listening to Frank Sinatra’s “You Make Me Feel So Young” when he got back from the funeral, his best friend in tow. They were moving in together on the top floor of that apartment building; it kept things cheaper.

__

“Bucky?”

“Who the hell’s Bucky?”

__

He knows the year is 1995 because he can do basic math. The billboard to the right of the highway advertises a special fifty-year anniversary exhibit on Captain America to “honor one of America’s greatest heroes”. Curiosity piqued, he calls Natalia and tells her he will be late to their dinner date. Their mission is over with a few days to spare. He has time.

The museum does not actually have much to show beyond replicas and informational videos. It is enough, though, because he recognizes his own face in one of them. Captain America is standing on his right, smiling and talking to the camera.

Suddenly, there’s an old song going through his head and he thinks it was sung by a lady named Ella Fitzgerald.

For someone so incredibly shy, Steve had been a real charmer once they got him on camera. His smile set dames swooning and gained the trust of thousands at a glance. He didn’t understand how Steve did it—sure, he’d been the one with the easy charisma and charm, but Steve was always just plain trustworthy.

Knowing this comes as a shock to him and he stares at the propaganda footage on loop for an hour, trying to figure out why Steve Rogers makes him feel like he’s lost some organ that’s vital to living.

Then one of his superiors turns up with Natalia on his arm. “Kolya,” she sighs at him, “You should know better than to go looking at American foolishness. They’re going to have to wipe you again.”

He’s still too distracted by the television to notice the tranquilizer she gives him until he’s dizzy and collapsing.

__

His mouth tastes of plastic and copper and he can’t move. There are restraints at his wrists and ankles—electromagnets that not only disable circuitry in his arm, but are stronger than he can pull off. If it weren’t for them, the straps across his torso, thighs, even the apparatus holding his head in place would be easy to rip off.

“Oh good you’re awake. How do you feel?” A man in a lab coat leans over him.  It’s an easy face to memorize—lean, blonde, sharp nose and tiny teeth.

He rolls his tongue around his mouth before he speaks. His teeth ache. He must have been grinding them in his sleep. “You can’t do this,” is the first thing that comes to mind to say, in English, not Russian. They can’t do this. They can’t put him back. He has “DeLovely” playing in his head. He likes it. It reminds him of home.

“You’ve done well, aside from the mishap there at the museum.” The praise comes from somewhere across the room in a voice that could be a man’s or a woman’s.

Then the doctor is leaning back over him again. “Open your mouth.”

Not that he knows where home is. But he wants to find out, more than anything.

There’s a biteguard a few inches from his lips and he clenches his jaw. If he could he’d shake his head. He wants to tell the doctor to shove the biteguard up his ass. That he’s not a tool any more, that he remembers how to swing dance and what it was like growing up in New York with little food and less money. But that would involve opening his mouth.

Then, frustrated, the doctor sighs and breaks the middle finger of his right hand. It’s startling enough that he gasps, and the biteguard is shoved between his teeth.

“Was that so hard?”

__

His left arm is designed to withstand all manner of traumas that would snap or rip off something made of flesh. It’s been anchored into his body—his clavicle, scapula, and ribs replaced so it will hold more firmly to his skeleton and be harder to remove for study should he ever be vivisected.

It should not be affected by being submerged in water.

But then, it has never been tested against an equal in strength. It has never been forced to retreat, the plates unlocking themselves as a last ditch effort to avoid damage while he is pushed backwards, with a sensation like bones aligning in their sockets. Something so alien and against his will should not come as such a relief.

Submersion, after that, trips something in his wiring and he is keenly aware of the extra sixty pounds hanging off of the left half of his torso. It’s a miracle that he can force the fingers to contract around enough fabric to drag the man out of the river.

__

The apartment smelled of detergent. They couldn’t afford to pay Maggie Henderson to use her washing machine anymore, so they invested in a washboard. Once a week his best friend filled their bathtub with water and soap flakes and went to town on their dirty clothes.  
“I can wash my own pants,” he objected on Sunday afternoon. “You ain’t my mother or my wife.”

“If I let you do your own it’d build up for a month straight before you even thought about it. ‘Cause you’re a bum, plain and simple. Besides, I gotta do somethin’ to contribute.”

“You contribute plenty.”  
“Only when commissions are comin’ in and right now nobody needs portraits or illustrations done. So I’m doin’ your laundry. You got a problem with that?”

“When you get hired again we’re gonna divide up the housework fifty-fifty. It’s not fair otherwise.”

“Gee, Buck, I didn’t know you liked scrubbin’ floors so much. I’ll get my portfolio out to everybody in the city so you can start sharin’ the load again.”

“Nobody likes scrubbin’ floors, you mook. Fair’s fair, though, and I don’t want you gettin’ sick because you’re doin’ all the housework.”

“Now who’s actin’ like whose ma?” His best friend threw a wet sock that went sailing past his head to smack wetly against the door. He stooped to pick it up and throw it back, getting his best friend right in the face. They laughed until the neighbors complained about the noise.  
__

(He was not the villain. Not yet.)

__

 

History is full of names. None of them are his.

__

One of his arms is not like the other. It isn’t something that bothers him, but other people—those who are not his superiors—frequently cast unnerved glances at the arm that is made of metal alloys instead of flesh and blood. He gets shot in 1957 and the blonde nurse stitching him up asks him if his left arm feels very much different from his right arm. When she goes off to get a bandage to wrap his bicep with, a redheaded nurse comes back instead.

It gets him thinking, though, about how his arms are different. The left is all plates and quiet, cold mechanisms. If he focuses he can feel the coolant and other fluids being pumped through it in time with his pulse but softer and smoother than his pulse runs even at rest. There is no catch from overexertion in his muscles because his left arm has none. There is no bruising sensation when force is applied to the external casing, even when it scratches or dents. He can feel the discomfort of the pressure but it is not the same sudden give of breaking bones—there is always a failsafe that forces the plates to gently unlock before they bend and break beyond repair, whether he wants the arm to give out or not.

His left arm is different and it is meant to be that way. If it were not what it is, he would not be The Winter Soldier, and he would be useless to the world.

__

“You’re being deployed to Dallas within the hour.”

The assassin nods.

“The window of opportunity is small. Other operatives will cover you—they will be removed accordingly after the fact. At 12:30 pm you will have one shot at the presidential motorcade. Do you understand?”

He nods again.

“I would wish good luck, but that implies that you might fail. You know how much the world’s stability depends upon your success. You will not fail.”

As if a direct order could be disobeyed.

__

“Good evening.”

The table is made of cheap metal and the yellowing light hanging above him makes the dents and stains on it easier to spot. Rust stains or blood stains?

 He doesn’t know why he’s sitting at a table or who the woman in front of him is.

“Good evening,” he replies, unsure.

“What’s your name?” The woman sitting across from him is in a dark green uniform. There’s a pin on her lapel. It’s familiar, the monster glaring at him from it, but why it’s familiar is impossible to put into words.

His reply comes slowly. “… I don’t understand.”

“What’s your name? You’re a person, are you not? Most people have names.” She smiles and that—it’s meant to be comforting, though trying to draw comfort out of it is grasping at burning straws.

What is his name? Of course he has one—everyone gets one when they’re born. He frowns. He can’t think of a name. Maybe he wasn’t born.

The light is starting to make his head hurt.

Or maybe his head hurts because he’s hungry. He’s just noticed it. His stomach is twisting from emptiness and he wouldn’t mind some food. It would get rid of the taste of chlorine in his mouth. Food would be nice.

What sort of things are food? Not metal, certainly. Metal like his left hand— no, his whole left arm. The woman doesn’t have a metal arm, so that can’t be normal.

“That’s okay. I can tell that you’re not ready for that yet. Let’s try another one,” she’s still smiling, “why are you here this morning?”

He blinks, confused. There’s paint peeling off the wall behind the woman in the suit. His left arm is freezing cold. “It’s the evening.”

“No, it’s morning. 8 o’clock if you want to be specific.”

“But you said it was evening. Earlier. When you first got here a few minutes ago.” He’s hungry, and his left arm aches worse than his head. There’s something missing from it.

“I’ve been here for an hour already. Why do you think it’s evening?”

“Because you said so! Because I’m hungry like I haven’t eaten all day! I don’t know! It just is!”

“It’s morning. You know it is.”

He shrinks away from her. He’d push himself into the back corner of the room but can’t make himself get up from his chair. Staring hard at the edge of the table—it’s got blood on it that’s fresh and it’s dented—he says, “No, I don’t.”

“Clearly not. Let’s try something easier: what’s your name?”

The noise he makes is animal, pained. “I don’t know.”

The woman makes a disgusted noise and reaches for him, something white in her hand—he recoils.

“ _Take it_ ,” she orders. “Your nose is bleeding again.”

It’s a handkerchief. Just a handkerchief. Embroidered in green with the same monster that’s on her lapel pin that he still doesn’t have a name for. Hand shaking, he takes the handkerchief so he can use it to sop up the blood that’s started running over his lips and down his chin. The woman is irritated, her lips pressed into a line and her eyes flat.

She rolls her eyes and adjusts how he’s holding his nose. “Don’t put your head back. You’ll swallow blood and that’ll make you vomit. You won’t like that.”

He nods.

“Do you know anything at all?”

He shakes his head, which makes him dizzy. There’s blood on the soft white pants he’s wearing. He thinks there might be blood on the wall behind the woman, too, but he doesn’t want to look up to double check. He doesn’t want to think about whose blood it is or how long he’s been here.

“Do you know why you know nothing?”

Again, he shakes his head but slower this time.

She smiles again, not unkindly, and reaches across to stroke his hair back from his forehead. He doesn’t flinch away. “That’s because you don’t know anything until I tell you what you know. If I say it’s morning, it’s morning. If you have a name I will tell you what it is.”

He nods once more.

“What is your name?”

Why are his eyes watering? He isn’t in pain. But still his chest is tight, his blood pounding in every one of his limbs (his left arm is not one of his limbs) and he doesn’t trust himself to speak. Something tells him that this is how his body feels when he’s afraid, so it must be that. He must be afraid. He swallows it.

“I don’t have one.”

__

The girl sleeps with half a dozen stuffed rabbits and a—distinctly Western-- Wonder Woman comforter. Her mother says she’s too old for the rabbits.

She is Romanyshyn, Kalyna. Age 12. Daughter of Dmytro Romanyshyn, investment banker and financial analyst to the weapons manufacturing company, Zavod. Mr. Romanyshyn has begun trying to sell his superiors’ secrets; he needs to be taught a gentle lesson.

It’s an easy thing for the assassin to slip into her room. He puts a gloved hand over her mouth before slitting her throat cleanly. She never so much as opens her eyes, but her sleep is disturbed. She chokes and coughs before she bleeds out onto her satin pillow case.

He leaves a HYDRA pin on her nightstand and slips back out the window.

__

His best friend handed him a palm-sized packet made out of newspaper.

“What’s this supposed to be?”

“Nothin’. Now hurry up and open it.”

“Well if it’s nothin’ I might as well wait,” he said as he tore the neatly folded paper and dumped the contents out into his hand—a necklace.

It was a St. Sebastian medal, no more than an inch in diameter, and from the look of it and the chain it was on, it wasn’t cheap, either. The metal was weighty in his palm, the image of Sebastian stamped into one side, riddled with arrows. “Pray for us” was stamped on the reverse. “Steve, this is too expensive—I can’t take this.” He tried to hand it back, to no avail.

“Just think of it like a good luck charm, okay? Somebody’s gotta take care of your sorry ass over there since I won’t be around to keep you in line.”

There are a lot of things he could have said to that about how the patron saint of marksmen and soldiers was martyred by marksmen and soldiers. How it was morbid as hell to carry the picture of a dying man into war with you when you didn’t even want to go to war in the first place. He didn’t want to think about dying. He wanted to get it over with, with minimal effort and come back home again.

He said none of this. The medal went on the chain with his dog tags. That’s where it stayed until they took it from him.

__

 

“What’dya mean there’s  _something wrong with my brain_?”  
  
He speaks Russian and English, broken together thanks to some crossed wires. At least, that’s how the scientists explain it. He gets the feeling there’s more to it than that. The room is meticulously clean and bright. It smells of astringent. There is a chair six feet in front of him.  
  
“ _Sit still_.”  
  
The soldier sits still. They’ve shaved his head, put an IV in his right arm. He knows when they start screwing a halo-looking device into his skull, but he can’t feel it.   
  
“I don’t  _like doctor’s offices, so you can understand_ my nerves having my  _head shaved and bein’ dragged into_ surgery.” No one laughs. He asks, eyes bright, and unafraid because of the sedatives they’re giving him, “What’s that for?”  
  
“ _It’s to stabilize you,_ ” a woman tells him as she is escorted through the operating room door. She has red hair, pulled back and covered up. She’s twenty-two at most. She’s wearing scrubs and a surgical mask, but her fingernails are painted and that suggests that she is no surgeon.  
  
The lights are unbearably bright, even though they are shining on the top of his skull and not in his face.  
  
“Who’re you?”  
  
“ _Don’t speak such a piggish language when you don’t have to, Kolya, it doesn’t become you,_ ” she tells him and he realizes she’s not speaking English. She says, “ _I am Natasha._ ”  
  
He tries to nod but he can’t move anything except his eyes and mouth. The heart rate monitor starts beeping at a faster pace. “I’m not— _my name is not Kolya_.”  
  
She looks sympathetic, all big green eyes and dainty bones as she sits there, out of the surgeon’s way, her legs crossed and her hands clasped on top of them. “ _Yes, it is. You’ve just forgotten. You’re here so the doctors can fix that._ ”

A saw turns on, whirring quietly. They must have already removed the skin of his scalp. He can’t feel them sawing through bone, but he thinks he might be able to smell it. His teeth buzz with it.  
  
 _“Will it hurt?_ ”  
  
“ _No, that’s why I’m here, Kolya. You will answer the questions they ask you and I will make sure you do not hurt._ ”  
  
And he is grateful, as the surgery begins, for the woman’s presence. Natasha. He tries to remember that her name is Natasha. She seems to know him and when she looks at him, it seems like there’s a real person inside her. It’s comforting.  
  
Something inside his head is tapped and several things happen at once. He can no longer see the operating room or Natasha and he can only smell car exhaust. In the summer when it’s too hot to be alive and there are melted oil pastels leaking all over the one desk in the apartment—and the desk isn’t his but he doesn’t know whose it is any more.  
  
He hears music playing in the distance, not the sort you swing to but the kind that, if you’re lucky, needs you to hold a dame close and lead a box step at its least complex. If you’re real lucky she’ll lay her head on your shoulder. It’s melancholy and sweet. He’s singing, low and a hair off key, and there’s a man with blonde hair in the kitchen. He’s in love for half a second.  
  
Then it stops. His mind goes blank and he blinks. There are people talking to him. There is a woman sitting across from him. He cannot move. The woman is familiar.  
  
“ _The other night, dear, I dreamt I held you in my arms_ ,” he tells her, because the words are the only thing that come to mind. The language isn’t right, it shouldn’t be in Russian, but he can’t think of the one it’s supposed to be.  
  
She cocks her head.   
  
The others in the room are still talking to him.  _“Soldier, how do you feel?”_

His face is wet and he thinks it might be with blood—except that can’t be right, because he’s in surgery. Yes, he remembers that. And for there to be blood on his face the surgeon would have had to make serious mistakes—which would not likely leave him awake. He must be crying, then.  
  
Outside, someone shouts, “ _You incompetent fucks what did you do to it? Do you have any idea how much is invested in—_ ”  
  
He frowns at the woman across from him. “ _Natasha_ ,” he says, and that gets her attention again. “ _Are they done yet?_ ”  
  
She shakes her head. “ _No. You hallucinated, and they had to stop for a time. What year is it?_ ”  
  
He tries to shrug, then remembers he’s paralyzed. He says, “ _I don’t know._ ”  
  
She makes eye contact with someone behind him, then looks back at him and nods. “ _That’s a good thing. How do you feel?”_  
  
“ _Slightly light headed, like my skull’s been cut open._ ”  
  
Natasha nods again. The surgeons continue.

It is comforting that she doesn’t ask his name. There are many names in his head, but none of them are his.

__

 

 

They never speak to him and he never gets close enough to see the whites of their eyes.

__

“Sergeant James Barnes. Serial number: 32557241.”

A heavy sigh from the left. Someone mutters, “Stubborn,” while the authoritative voice comes back with, “Again.”

The electrodes are pressed back to his temples. “Sergeant James—“ He gets that much out before the click that heralds the electricity rings out.

He chokes on his own voice, a gurgling noise coming out instead of words while his eyes roll back into his head. The entirety of his body goes taught, burning and straining against the restraints around his limbs and torso. The center of his head burns, somewhere inside of his brain not just his skin and scalp. It’s inside every inch of him, electricity slithering just under the surface of his skin and pulling muscle away from bone.

“Stop,” the authority orders.

Just like that, it does. He can’t feel his face or fingertips. Blinking comes to him slowly—he has to think about the muscles involved, his eyes blinking out of sync with each other—and the ceiling above him is dim, even with the surgical light shining down on him. His tongue is swelling from where he’d bitten it. He should be able to taste the blood from the bite, but he can’t.

The table beneath him is damp. He’s pissed himself. Of _course_ he has. Insult to injury and all that.

“Do you think that did it?”

The shrug is evident in the authority’s response, “Let’s find out. What is your name?”

Name?

That’s the thing that’s given to children.

Was he ever a child?

He doesn’t remember.

But the authority is asking, so he must have a name. He must have been a child once. If he answers wrong, they’re going to—the word for it isn’t there. But they’re going to do something and _it will hurt._ He doesn’t want it to hurt.

Tongue heavy, he swallows the blood and saliva collecting in his mouth. The first sound he makes is more of a grunt than an attempt at speech. He tries again, forcing his jaw to form the first words that comes to mind, pushing his unresponsive tongue into position against the roof of his mouth. “S—sergeant. James. Bar—nes. Sss—erial number: 32… 557… 24… 1.” He knows who he is. They want him to forget. He won’t give them that satisfaction.

He’s a sniper, too. He doesn’t like mortar fire, but no one really does.

Someone used to call him Bucky.

Someone important.

 “Again.”

He whimpers.

__

“This is an important asset and the only one of its kind—if it shuts down we will not be able to replace it.”

“It’s a perflourocarbon liquid, among other things; entirely breathable. It’s perfectly safe and the best guaranteed method of cryogentic preservation with the quickest recovery time for those being taken out of it. At the very worst there will be some discomfort during the initial submersion but suspended animation will be achieved shortly thereafter.”

“If this fails, you will be punished.”

“I assure you, it will not fail.”

“Good. You may begin the submersion process when it’s unconscious; it’ll be safer for you that way.”

__

One of his superiors explains to him, once, why he has been made to be like this. For years he remembers it:  He must be nothing, know nothing, because capture is an inevitability. It is only a question of when.

And once captured, he knows he will be tortured for information—about himself, his superiors, his cause. He is the best, but he is still human, and he is weak. The weak will break when tortured, will tell the enemy everything. If the enemy knows everything, his superiors will have to stop their work; their work of ensuring the greater good and preserving order in the world. That cannot be allowed to happen.

It follows, then, that it is best for him to know nothing, to be nothing.

He is nothing but a weapon aimed at the enemy.

__

When he asks, “Who was that man on the bridge?” no one in the room will answer him.

Silence isn’t good enough.

Without standing from the examination chair, he breaks the arm of the nearest orderly in half with a few quick movements. While the man screams, he sits and waits. His superiors will come soon and someone will explain this to him.

__

Sophomore year of high school, all his English teacher could talk about was ideas. She called him “Mr. Barnes” and looked at him over the rim of her thick glasses when she tried to impress upon him the importance of studying. The blackboard was covered with Aristotle and Nietzsche daily.

His best friend ate it up, loved it to pieces—all that stuff that _he_ didn’t care about. He couldn’t exactly tell him that he’d rather be trying to get the gal in his algebra class to go to the movies with him. Instead he stayed home with his best friend studying philosophy and human thought. It was a bore.

He passed sophomore English with a B+.

__

“What is your name?”

There are half a dozen possibilities that come to mind. His head aches from whatever’s been done to it this time—he knows there have been other times before this. There is a woman in the corner taking notes on a clipboard.

“Focus here, soldier.”

And just like that he looks back at the man in front of him. The bulging cheeks and watery eyes are familiar.

“You don’t command me.”

The doctor chuckles. “No, I only fix you. What is your name?”

He tries to say something several times. _Edmund Tracey. Kolya Sorrel. Nicolai Dupont. Johnathan Roterdam._ All of them are his names from previous times but none of them are right. Finally, one syllable works its way out of his mouth, “James.”

 Behind thick glasses, the doctor’s eyebrows raise. “That one is new,” he muses. “Now, touch your right index fingertip to the tip of your nose, please.”

He blinks slowly, frowning, then obeys.

“And the same for the left.”

He touches his left index fingertip to the tip of his nose. His left hand is cold to the touch, shining because it’s made of some metal that he can’t remember the name of.

“I’m glad to see that your motor cortex was not damaged during the procedure. Now if you would be so kind as to follow my lovely assistant, we must now run more relevant tests to be assured of your brain’s functioning.”

“There’s something wrong with my brain?” He raises a hand to touch his head on reflex—and he finds that his scalp has been shaved down to the skin where it isn’t covered by thick bandages.

The doctor doesn’t answer his question. The woman with the clipboard comes forward and places a hand on his bare shoulder. She’s warm, and that startles him into jerking so hard something twinges in his neck then all the way down his back.

“Be careful with that, Miss Romanovna. It is a very fine piece of equipment, even if it does need further calibration.”

__

Rogers, Steven. Age 26 or 96, depending on how you count the years spent frozen in the Arctic. American citizen. Alias: Captain America. Objective: termination.

At first, he won’t stay down. He has a mission of his own and never has the Winter Soldier encountered someone so bent on success. They are similar in that regard.

Identifying with the mark is dangerous.

He has a clear shot at the back of Rogers’ head—one shot, and he will be finished.

He shoots him in the back four times. He still can’t lift the sights of his gun enough for a headshot.

__

“What is your name?”

This time he’s the one asking the question. The girl he’s asking is perhaps twelve years old, her shoulder barely higher than his hip. Her hair is a shade of brown that, with sunlight and proper nutrition, looks like it will turn redder than blood.

“Natalia,” she tells him. Her eyes are wide but her breathing is steady. She is new, but not afraid.

“Natalia,” he repeats, so she can hear someone else say it. So she will know that she did not speak it into a void. “Everything is a test, Natalia. You will want to remember that.”

She nods.

It turns out that she’s meant to be his protégé.

The first day she leaves with several broken ribs. There is no room for weakness in those who are meant to serve the motherland.

She comes back to him, ribs taped, and he knows she will stay for at least a short while longer. That she does not cry when her reflexes are too slow and he snaps her collarbone makes him proud.

__

They took his best friend too, once upon a time, changed him just as much if not more.

Empirically it was the same thing. His skin could barely contain him after they were done with him. Sick was a four letter word that held no fear or power for him. He was faster, stronger, and no less genuine.

It was strange to know someone could be so changed and still inspire such loyalty.

He followed his best friend back into the war they said would end all wars. 

He followed him to the end of the line.

__

Sometimes they run.

Hearts racing faster than their feet can carry them, through restaurant kitchens into back alleys. One notable mark in Thailand even scrambles over a razor-wire topped fence. Razor wire has no effect on the body armor or titanium alloys that the assassin is made of and he scales it after the mark easily, without any of the bleeding and pain.

Invariably, he will catch them and they will be killed.

Some of them know this and accept their fate. Others speak to him, try to bargain.

It was confusing the first time a mark spoke to him.

Merita, Antione. Age 57. Spanish. Pharmaceutical company representative. “Please, I have children! I can pay you—whatever your superiors are paying you I will double it!”

Then a bullet to the left eye cuts him off. Merita’s skull and brain spatter against the wall behind him. The corpse slumps to its knees, then sideways against the same wall, leaving a swathe of blood down the brick.

The assassin considers Merita’s last words. Why would the children matter? Why would he be paid? He does not work for money. He works for the good of the motherland and the world; no payment could replace that kind of peace.

__

He opens his eyes and realizes he’s under water.

It’s like floating inside his mother’s pearls, if they’d been melted down to thick and warm syrup. She sold them in 1933 so they could have coal for their stove that winter. They ran out of coal in February anyway.

Maybe it’s just a matter of time before he floats to the surface. He carefully does not listen to his lungs’ desire to inhale.

Muffled by the pearlescent liquid, someone says, “The paralytic effect of the anesthesia is wearing off sooner than anticipated, doctor.”

“Proceeding with the experiment may prove detrimental to your health—“

“ _Nonsense_. He poses no threat.”

He’s dizzy from holding his breath. The source of light is difficult to pinpoint. He’s floating in milky gold.

In his right ear, he hears a man tell him, “Inhaling will not hurt you. You are safe— the liquid is breathable and won’t harm you.”

It is not an order.

His throat burns. Sensation is coming back to his extremities; his left arm doesn’t throb quite like something so recently damaged should—he had been shot there twice, the last he recalled.

His head spins.

Another voice in his ear. Neither male nor female; one of his superiors: “Take a deep breath.”

His jaw relaxes open. Inhaling uses the throat and the nose and for a split second he catches the smell of chlorine. He tries to swallow as much as he can anyway. Chalky and warm, the liquid goes down easily but it isn’t enough to lower the level so he can reach the surface and breathe. He gasps and convulses, limbs clawing forward through water. He hits a glass wall—he still can’t see. The superiors are still talking to him, but he cannot hear them.

Are they decommissioning him?

Has he failed?

His last mission was successful. He doesn’t understand.

He cannot breathe.

Is he being decommissioned?

He knows he did not fail.

Liquid fills his lungs and he goes still to drown in his mother’s pearls.

__

Training is all but ceaseless. They bring in the most successful participant in the Black Widow program to test against him.

He calls her Natalia.

The woman attached to the name is taller now, almost eye to eye with him. Her eyes are sharp as the knife he carries. She narrows her eyes at him as if he’s insulted her.

He smiles and dodges the kick she levels at his head.

__

There was a village in Austria with one of the nicest inns he ever had the fortune of staying at. Not that his standards were high. That was the only time they got to stay in an inn during the war.

The fireplace crackled, the scent of woodsmoke sweet in the air underneath the freshly-slaughtered chicken that was roasting on a spit. The inkeep’s daughter was sitting beside him and laughing. The rest of his division, singing and drinking. All he could think about is the chicken.  
  
 He remembered the last time he was this hungry—it was February of 1937. Bad things always seemed to happen in February; running out of coal, Steve getting pneumonia, the soup line running out of food when he was two people away from the front of the line. This February broke that pattern. The chicken tasted like heaven.

 

__

He wanted to be somebody when he grew up.

__

It’s getting warmer. That’s what wakes him up, the slow inching toward a something that isn’t frigid.

“…titanium-adamantium alloy with trace elements of vibranium…”

The muscles in his abdomen and back shudder as his body remembers that it isn’t supposed to be this cold. The shivering jolts him awake.

“… perfect counterpoint to the vibranium shield! He’ll be able to handle it, use it against—”

“ _We_ , not he. This is an asset to help us meet our goals that just happens to look like a person. Don’t forget that.”

He opens his eyes in time to be pulled upward. From dull, pearly amber into harsh light. Just like that he can’t breathe. It’s too dry and too bright. There are voices all around him and they hurt his ears.

His lungs spasm to bring up the fluid he’d been breathing. Coughing and gagging, he doubles over to expel water and stomach acid and the cloudy liquid he’s been existing in.

Like a drowning man, his torso wrenches itself while he tries to pull air into his lungs. Hot, dry, and awful air that claws its way down his windpipe to stir up the remains of the fluid in his lungs even more. He chokes remnants up by the mouthful with mucus and blood.

“… will be perfect for this mission…”

Like an animal, he pants and heaves from his place on the floor.

“Yes, if the instability can be controlled. You remember Berlin.”

He’s braced on his hands and knees and his breath is finally coming back to him. He makes an inhuman noise that might be half of a groan. Every muscle in his body burns. He wants to be back in the pearlescent amber. He wants to go back to sleep.

“The Winter Soldier is necessary for this mission. He will be decommissioned after the fact.”

He doesn’t understand their words.

Naked, kneeling, aching, he only cares that he can breathe.

__

Miller, April. 31. Current residence: uptown Manhattan. Marital status: single. Occupation: neuro-linguistics professor at NYU, suspected consult of SHIELD.

“Incapacitate her and bring her in for interrogation. She may prove to be a valuable asset.”

Miller lives alone. She stops at the Dreamers’ café two blocks from her residence at 7:19 every morning for tea—the kind changes depending on her mood—before she heads down to the subway. She arrives at work at 8:07 and spends twelve minutes bickering good naturedly with her TA before going to her first class. Most days her lectures are prepared the night beforehand, so she does not hurry.

It is not that she does not hurry, but that she _cannot_.

It takes him three days to realize that this is the case. She is not as able bodied as most assume. There is a record of an accident in her file that damaged her ability to walk as a teenager. Most importantly, yet unrecorded: _she is still damaged from it_.

That will make his work much simpler. He sets up a scope with a view of the windows of her home; three more days and he knows, roughly, how she is kept mobile. A brace of some sort in plain metal. It does not exist on the mobility aids market. It cradles her pelvis and joints down to her ankles.  He’ll have to take care not to damage it; there are plenty of his fellow agents who could benefit from this technology. His superiors will be pleased with it.

It’s late Saturday morning when he picks the lock on her front door and slips inside her apartment, locking it behind him. He has a four and a half minute window during which Miller will finish her shower and work herself into the brace.

Except he’s a minute late in his estimates. She is on her way to getting dressed when he stops outside of her room.

He stands outside her bedroom door and calculates the next two minutes. (It will be a quick sequence of events from here.  Back her into her dresser, arm at her throat, knife pushed into her mouth and the blade barely kissing the inside of her cheek. “ _Don’t speak_.” She’s intelligent, and will understand. She will _wait_ and she will fight back. Break the external support around her pelvis. Inject her with a tranquilizer. Clean up the evidence of the struggle; double check that all genetic material including any hair she pulls from his head is collected. Call for extraction.)

He exhales and opens the bedroom door.

__

On a fire escape in November, when the wind was up so the stench of the city was hard to catch, he had his first kiss. School had been out for a couple of hours already but they were too stubborn to go back inside. Freshman year of high school had them both down but for different reasons.

“What d’ya think kissin’ girls is like?”

“How am I supposed to know? Never kissed one.” He didn’t know how to bring up that he was gonna have to drop out of school soon. His ma needed help with the bills and there was a factory a few blocks over that needed extra hands.

“But I thought you and Sandy Calen were goin’ together.”

“Nah, that’s just a rumor. I never kissed nobody and I sure ain’t goin’ with anybody either.”

“Do you want to?”

“Do I want to what?”

“Kiss somebody.”

It was easy to shrug. “Well sure. Who doesn’t? It seems like a pretty big deal though. What if you mess up, then the girl never wants to talk to you again, y’know?”

“Maybe you’re supposed to practice. So that doesn’t happen.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

It was an easy thing to sit back and let himself be kissed.

__

The first prototypes of his left arm looked real. He’s seen pictures over the years.

They changed to the polished vibranium-adamantium-steel alloy because a silicone-based fleshy layer caused overheating. Because anything other than polished plating wasn’t a good enough representation of the motherland’s progress. Because having a realistic arm would make it harder to remember that he was a tool, a weapon, a trigger pointed at the enemies of world order.

__

This target is familiar.

Rogers, Steven— Alias: Captain America—will not stay down. He will not stop speaking.

The sound of his voice hurts, like swallowing the perflourocarbon liquid they’ll freeze him in when this mission is accomplished. No matter how many times he hits him, Rogers just drops his shield and will not stop talking.

He should shoot him, cut his throat, break his neck—it’s nothing he hasn’t done dozens of times before, nothing he won’t do dozens of times in the future. It should be easy. But _he knows him_.  
The familiarity will not end well, they will dig into his brain and spine again and it will burn. He needs Rogers to _stop_. He needs to focus on his mission.

“You’re my mission!” It’s a desperate attempt to convince himself that the panic-inducing recognition in the back of his mind isn’t there.

He can’t kill Rogers, but he can let him drown. Drowning is easy—he should know—and it’s just as easy to let someone drown. None of his superiors have ever batted an eyelash when they locked him into the tank.

He’s wrong. It is not easy.

__

When he was young, his mother took him to visit her second cousin Judy-Ann down in Maryland. There was a grey cat wandering around his mother’s ankles, slinking around on its paws and swishing its tail around anything that would stand still long enough. When anyone got too close to it, though, the cat trotted off a few yards, protesting and pretending not to notice the humans’ presence. He followed the chirruping meows the cat made through the house.

The floors were wooden and shinier than anything. He could see himself in them. They smelled like fresh lemons and he was about to lick them when he caught sight of a man at the back door. The man didn’t notice him. He was intent on what he held in his hands: a piece of wood and a pocketknife. The wood looked just like Judy-Ann. And at three years old, he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a miniature Judy-Ann the man was holding. He went back into the living room to double check that cousin Judy-Ann hadn’t been shrunk down to palm-size. The cat followed him, and he forgot what he’d come into the living room for.

Later that evening he realized that the man with the wood and the knife had been _carving_ the wood to look like cousin Judy-Ann. He wanted to tell mama, but she looked too tired.

The man with the knife had carved the block almost as an afterthought, the movement was natural like breathing. He decided right then that he wanted his hands to be exactly that clever. Then he could use them to do and make things that would be good. Things that would make people want to do those things too.

He wanted to be somebody when he grew up.

He should have been more specific.

__

He dives into the Potomac before Rogers even breeches the water’s surface.

 


End file.
